The role of the hero in antiquity 2/7
“So, what do you think is wrong with him?” Ryan asked from behind his laptop during one of those nights when Jon sat cross-legged on the floor sorting through photographs while Ryan was typing away furiously, both of them by now used to working alongside each other in companionable comfortable silence.
Ryan had never, ever initiated a conversation in moments like this and Jon had no idea what had even brought on the question.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” he asked, dropping the picture he was holding onto the pile on the floor.
“Brendon. What’s wrong with him?”
Jon still didn’t get it. Brendon had been living with them for about three months. Three easy, chilled out months without any drama whatsoever.
“Wrong?” he echoed and Ryan sighed, looking back at the screen longingly for a moment, then shutting it and shuffling over to the couch. Ryan was probably pissed Jon wasn’t Spencer. Spencer didn’t need Ryan to explain his tangled thought processes.
“Well, there’s obviously something wrong with Brendon. You can’t tell me you didn’t notice that.”
Jon snorted and wondered when Ryan had started doing empathy. Ryan didn’t even realize people where in the same room with him half the time. Ryan wasn’t relenting, though.
“Think about it, Jon. What do you actually know about him?”
Jon contemplated the question for a moment, his eyes straying back to the photograph on top of the not-completely-useless-pile. An outline of a shadow figure in stark black and white, walking away from the camera along the dark, blurred shoreline.
“He’s twenty-two. Likes Disney. Drinks vanilla soy latte and isn’t embarrassed to order it. Short attention-span. Teaches rich kids to play all sorts of instruments your average person can’t pronounce the name of. His room’s a mess, but he never leaves his shit lying around anywhere else. Loses his glasses about three times a day even though he usually wears contacts. Makes good spaghetti. Spends a lot of time online when he’s not out somewhere. Is this supposed to be going anywhere in particular?”
Ryan smiled and it looked a little indulgent.
“Precisely.”
“For fuck’s sake, Ross.”
“No, just think about it. What do you know about me?”
“Um. Dude.” He wasn’t quite sure he wanted to have this conversation.
“Come on, Walker. Indulge me.”
“Born in Vegas, 30th August 1986, which makes you 23. Spencer’s your best friend and has been forever. If it wasn’t for him, you’d probably be straight and dating someone too pretty and shallow for your own good cause Spencer’s the only person in the world who’s allowed to call you on your bullshit. Scholarship for an MA in Literature that you never took cause you moved to Chicago with Spence when… well, when.”
Ryan nodded, acknowledging he didn’t need to hear the part involving hospitals and alcohol poisoning and funerals repeated back to him.
“’sides, you don’t believe in that form of education, you’re convinced true enlightenment doesn’t happen in study halls. That’s a direct quote. Completely unironic and unrepentant about your fashion choices. No brothers and sisters. Smart as fuck. Too caught up in your head most of the time. Don’t even get me started on your sexual preferences cause that’s information I could have died happily without knowing and I’m not repeating it. Also, asking me annoying pointless questions.”
Ryan leaned forward slightly. “See?”
Jon shook his head.
“Actually, no. I really, really don’t.”
“Okay, my turn then. Jonathan Jacob Walker, born and bred right here in Chicago, named after your maternal grandfather who used to be a doctor at Mercy Hospital where you were delivered at 3:15 am on 17th September 1985, meaning you’re a Virgo, Leo rising, which makes a lot of sense. Half-assed about your college degree, but still going for it just in case. Practical. Great photographer. Tom leaving without saying goodbye broke your heart, but you won’t admit that even to yourself. Your first cat was named Wednesday and I’m pretty sure you’re still not above jerking off to anything that’s got Christina Ricci in it even if you pretend otherwise. You got that cat when you were seven, at the shopping centre downtown. You picked her cause she was the smallest. You love your mom and manage to never forget any of the birthdays of your three brothers. You took driver’s ed and almost failed cause you were too baked to tell left from right. You really liked visiting your grandparents when you were little. That one time in high school, you…”
Jon was floored. “Ry, what the fuck, seriously? Are you… um. Is this the part where I find out my flatmate’s been stalking me to turn me into a character for his novel?”
Ryan blushed furiously. Well, fuck.
“I’m suing you, dude.”
“It’s not that. It’s just. I remember shit like that. I write. So, you know, depth of character, all that kind of thing, it matters. I just pay attention. And Brendon… all we know is the guy likes Disney. Besides, sometimes, when he doesn’t think anyone’s watching, he looks really tired.”
Jon lit a joint. He was slightly worried how intense Ryan was, how serious. Usually, outbursts like this were reserved for very special subjects, like arguing the point of watching foreign language movies without subtitles.
“I’m still not with you, man,” he commented as he passed the joint over to Ryan after a couple of hits.
“My point, Jon, is that I’m actually worrying about him.”
Jon choked on the smoke he’d still been holding in his lungs. Ryan of all people admitting to actually having feelings for anyone that wasn’t Spencer was unheard of. He didn’t get a chance to voice the thought though, cause there was a key turning in the lock and Brendon stumbled in with a smile.
“Another late night, guys?”
As awkward silences went, this one was up there. Brendon didn’t falter, reaching over to Ryan and taking the joint from him casually, not looking at anyone in particular. And Jon had to admit Brendon should have noticed. Couldn’t have not noticed. Brendon had to be faking not noticing.
Ryan shot Jon a meaningful look, eyebrows raised. Then, he nodded at the not-completely-useless-pile of Jon’s prints on the carpet.
“Yeah, Jon and I were talking photographs. Now, I was saying there isn’t really enough contrast in this one to make it a good picture. It’s too dark and too vague and there isn’t really enough light to make the shadows look mysterious. The intent of hiding something is too blatantly obvious and that defies the point of the whole composition, which is aiming for secretive and subtle and achieves neither goal.”
Jon glanced down at the picture and then up at Ryan, but Ryan just smiled serenely, looking at Brendon.
“What do you think?”
Brendon stared straight back at Ryan for a moment, then, he focused his attention on the photograph in question.
“I actually like it better this way. Sure, it’s dark and it doesn’t give away much, but I’m not sure how much better the shot would be if it wasn’t, you know? Like this, it’s open to interpretation. The guy becomes an empty slate for your projection, let’s you fill in the blanks in a way you can stand looking at. He’s as ugly or pretty as you make him and you probably end up liking him better for that.”
Jon wasn’t sure what the fuck had just happened, but he was positive not a single person in the room was actually talking about photographs anymore. He wasn’t either when he transferred the print to the freaky-but-interesting-pile and smiled up at Brendon.
“You hear that, Ross? We’re keeping him.”
***
After that night, it was pretty difficult not to pull his head out of his ass. Jon started paying attention and that was all it took. He noticed the expression on Brendon’s face that Ryan had described as tired. In one of his notebooks, Ryan would probably have gone for something a little more descriptive. Exhausted. Burdened. Haunted. Yeah, Ryan would have gone for haunted.
Haunted wasn’t good. Jon had come across exactly three people in his life whose facial expressions justified the term: Ryan, Tom and Pete.
With Ryan, Jon kinda knew Ryan had been hit hard by all sorts of shit. Ryan most definitely wasn’t a fan of sharing, but Jon had eyes and ears and a Spencer, who sometimes, very rarely, mumbled a couple of carefully measured words about “stuff” when Ryan got to the point of being infuriating enough to justify homicide.
Besides, Ryan’s issues where the kind of obvious even someone apparently completely oblivious like Jon couldn’t miss. Ryan had this whole choreography of movements and expressions, flinches and freezes and wide eyes and long fingers digging into skinny wrists, the works.
Tom had gone to New York and that pretty much summed it up. Jon still refused to let his mind go there. Tom had been the kind of fucked up that came with occasional alcohol poisoning and arguments turning into fist-fights. Tom had been the kind of fucked up where a distorted reality riddled with self-delusion and self-doubt had become pretty much impossible to navigate without getting punched out.
Pete was all of those dysfunctions and more rolled up into one handy five foot human body. Jon could never figure out why he actually liked Pete, but he did. The scary part was that Pete’s particular brand of fucked up could be hugely entertaining. Until very suddenly it wasn’t and the guy was trying to jump off high-rises or bridges for real. Jon had had a couple of very special moments with Pete, special in the way that left you shaking for three days.
The point was Jon had been through some shit with his friends. He thought he’d learned to handle breakdowns in whatever shape or form. Brendon wasn’t breaking. Brendon had seemed fine. Almost. Brendon talked and walked and ate and slept, Brendon smiled and paid his bills and played music. Brendon had seemed pretty together.
Now, Jon was watching and thinking haunted. Now, Jon was noticing hours and hours of Brendon not being there. Strange hours, too, cause Jon very much doubted piano lessons happened after midnight. Jon noticed the way Brendon had conversations without engaging in them, without giving anything away. How good he was at that.
Jon wasn’t impressed. If truth be told, Jon was a little pissed, actually. Jon didn’t ask for much in people, but the one thing he really valued was honesty. He liked trusting his friends. That was important.
The opening he got maybe wasn’t exactly the one he had wished for, but yeah, he tried calling Brendon on his bullshit. It was one of those nights when Ryan had been dragged to the bedroom by Spencer with a couple of choice words that contained entirely too much information for Jon’s liking. Jon had stayed downstairs, scrolling to Tom’s online portfolio with the TV mute and blue in the background. It wasn’t entirely impossible that Jon felt a little lonely that night. He kinda needed to get laid. He kinda needed to get away from his brain churning out criticisms about his latest run of photographs in Tom’s voice, cause that was fucking pathetic.
He kinda wanted to get drunk. There was a bottle of whiskey in the fridge that had his name on it (literally, and that just never got old), so he grabbed that, not bothering with a glass. He maybe felt like the biggest idiot in the world when he raised it in a mock toast towards the computer screen where Tom’s photographs were staring back at him blankly. While Jon wasn’t enough of a teenage girl to burst into tears, he did manage to get spectacularly shit-faced. He only very narrowly avoided calling Tom, staring down at the name and number saved into his cell before he scrolled past it furiously and hit the dial on Pete’s name.
“Walker, the fuck?”
It was two forty-five am, so it wasn’t like he’d woken Pete up, he was pretty sure.
“’sup, Pete.”
Pete giggled. “Dude.” Implying Pete had picked up on Jon’s inebriated state, Jon inferred.
“You’re not as smart as you think, you know?” Cause no way Pete got away with second-guessing like that.
“Jon.”
“That’s my voice, Pete. Lay the fuck off. I use that. With Tom. The whole I’m-indulging-you-cause-you’ve-had-one-too-many. I got it down.”
Pete shook his head at the other end of the line, Jon could feel it. It made the world shift in time with Pete’s movement.
“’mdrunk.”
“No shit, Walker. So. Tom.”
“We’re not having this conversation.” Jon was putting his foot down on that.
“You called, dude.”
Pete was a complete asshole, what with not being drunk and managing to be coherent and right.
“You suck. I really hate you.”
Pete still sounded like he was smiling and Jon wasn’t too far gone not to care. It was nice to have friends who knew that sometimes, insults were the sincerest form of flattery.
“That’s cool, Jon. I am kinda an asshole.”
“Too true. Also, pretentious. Did I tell you I really fucking hate your hair?”
“Many times, Walker. Maybe if I bleached it and braided it, you’d fuck me. Assuming you’re still pretending you’re straight now that your best friend’s finally broken your heart.”
“Fuck a pink rabbit, Wentz. If you were the last guy on the planet, I’d inseminate a cockroach.”
There was a moment of silence. Jon blinked stupidly.
“Yeah, shit. I don’t have a comeback for that”, Pete admitted and Jon maybe shouldn’t have felt as smug as he did at that revelation.
“I win,” Jon slurred and hung up. Pete would understand. Pete was pretty damn good at random late night calls.
Jon totally hadn’t passed out shortly after ending that conversation, but maybe he had dozed off, cause the next thing he recalled was someone trying to pick him up from the floor.
“Tom?”
Fucking pathetic.
“Brendon”, someone replied quietly, most likely Brendon. Jon’s powers of deduction were awesome. He managed to open half an eye as he stumbled up. Brendon, indeed.
“Dude, what the fuck happened?” his mouth supplied while his brain was still catching up on that red-purple swelling thing around Brendon’s left eye that most definitely was a new feature to Brendon’s face. Jon didn’t like the look of it. Brendon shook his head quickly.
“Never mind. Let’s get you to bed. I’m pretty sure you won’t remember this in the morning.”
“Whoa, fuck that.” Cause yeah, Jon was drunk. This wasn’t good timing. But Brendon was hurt.
“Brendon, what the fuck happened to your face, man?”
“What the fuck happened to your balance?” Brendon replied, struggling to keep Jon upright.
Jon was nothing if not belligerent when he was three quarters of a bottle from sober.
“No, fuck you, Brendon. Fuck you. You don’t. You don’t fucking waltz in here with fucking…” Jon swayed a little and Brendon held out a hand to steady him. “fucking hurt on your face”, Jon finished.
Brendon rolled his eyes. “The word, Jon, is bruise. Possibly contusion if you’re Ryan. Now, it does not fucking matter, so let me get you to bed so you can puke and piss on your sheets instead of the living room carpet.”
Belligerent, Jon thought again, quite proud that he did too remember words. Big ones like that, no less. Brendon didn’t know a fucking thing.
“Dude, I’m drunk, not stupid. Whatever you wanna call that thing on your face, you look like shit and you’re a liar.”
Brendon didn’t even flinch. “Yeah. Please, will you just go to bed?”
Jon wasn’t drunk enough not to feel Brendon shattering next to him while they made their way up the stairs. He remembered fuck all after that.